Quote:Original post by Trapper Zoid For example, it would be dangerous to allow people to choose their own matches, as there'd be nothing to stop a team of people to collude in working together.
That actually goes much deeper than people think. I know a dev who works on one of the "you play with real money" MMO's and apparently the mob are very fond of useing it for money laundering. Its as easy as buying some random item ingame off another player for $10k real money. When viewing the bank account records it just looks like you paid the game or got paid by the game - no direct link which makes it a nightmare to trace where it came from. Its also alot cheaper to pay a games subscription fees than it is to hire a crooked accountant :P
If you ask me (which you don't have to), having a game like this requires too much in terms of the technical aspect.. You would have better luck doing a tiered pseudo tournament style trust system. Where each server has a form of value with a single master server that all servers report kills/cost to by user. Take a small % for yourself out of each payment.
By doing a trust system you rely on the player community to weed out the losers, give them some online tools to do so. Require players to pay out to each user by the end of the day. This payment system would be robust with all types of payment methods accepted of course, but not builtin to the hl2 engine. Make the billing a completely separate online interface.
Now this is open to all the other flaws others have stated, but the tiered tournament idea comes in when you allow servers to set (with approval) their kill to cash rates. So a newbie server would cost $0.001 per kill lets say, a practice server would = $0. This way if you don't get paid out for those kills, hey it's a few cents then you can give that user some form of online record of being an a**, and ratings mean close to nothing for this $$ amount. But the higher the risk server the more likely people will refuse to play with questionable players, and the REALLY high value servers could have such a high $$ value that it pays to have dedicated monitoring.
This way users can still host servers, but must register to a master server (yours) somewhere to charge per kill. Then they need to be approved for a $$ amount. And dispute support would be essential, not only for cheating players, but cheating servers. However, by not approving a server for more than a $0.01 value, nobody really looses anything (just time with some ratings quarrels).
Just my 2 cents, seems like it could work, but you need to build the idea out fully first. And the game play without the money needs to be good!
With the kind of cash you have, why not just buy a gambling license and produce an internet casino/sports booking website? There is more money in that.
if i joined a server my first aim would be to recon the other players and determine if they are better or worse than me. If they are better than me i would leave.
Most online fps games are ruled by a minority.
Look at bf2/ut/cs, its always the top 5 have 80% of the kills.
games wouldnt last 5 minutes, the instant you start to loose, you leave and join another server.
Im a pretty high scorer but i would not take the risk.
